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Vote It! WordPress Plugin

I’ve received an email from Maik Schindler of ZauberPage.de about his new Vote It! WordPress Plugin. Think of it as the Digg This button taken to the next level. Instead of just placing a Digg This button on your blog posts, Vote It! can place any social media button into your articles.

Social media sites like Digg are a great way to get traffic to your blog. Hitting the front page generally means thousands of new visitors checking out your article. Many webmasters dismiss the value of social media traffic because it’s very hard to convert. However, any traffic can be monetized if you know what you’re doing. Getting John Chow dot Com on the front page of Digg over and over again was how I built my initial reader base. I made good use of that Digg This button to help me get those Diggs. However, had Vote It! been around back then, I would have used it for sure.

The plugin is very easy to install – just upload to your WordPress plugins folder and activate. The setup is pretty self explanatory. You enter the codes for the various social media buttons and then tell the Plugin where to place the buttons on your blog posts.

The only downside I can see is if you’re using too many social media sites. Your posts would be full of buttons and that’s bound to lower its effectiveness. I recommend you use no more than three buttons at any one time.

There are three things I would like to add to posts but don’t want them cluttered. Bookmark this, send this, and vote this. Use a addthis button. Use Tell a Friend (thank you John Chow). But like many here, seems buttons would be better way to go than a plugin, especially as I am considering just using one social site for now to learn the in and outs. That means just one button.

Thanks for the tip. However, the version for this plug-in is v0.3. I just installed it on my blog, and it does NOT work! My blog is a standard WordPress installation. It uses the popular cutline theme.

I think the author might have rushed a little bit. There was no documentation on system requirements.

Also, based on what I’ve seen on the administrative UI, it only provides “Digg It” code by default. You still need to copy and paste codes for other social bookmarking sites yourself.

The only benefit you gain from installing this plugin is instead of editing the html/javascript code, it lets you copy and paste code to a text box. And, it lets you specify location of the plug-in.

This plugin needs more testing and documentation before wide adoption. Not ready for prime time.

"How I Went From Zero to Over $100,000 a Month"

The Original Dot Com Mogul

John Chow, a damn fine person, friend of the community, Ultimate Fighting Championship contestant, member of the Save the Whales Foundation, the man who controls the black market on baby seal pelts and member of the probably yo’ daddy foundation...

John Chow rocketed onto the blogging scene when he showed the income power of blogging by taking his blog from making zero to over $40,000 per month in just two years.